The Girl From Venice Read online

  “Get in line. Tonight everyone is calling Goebbels.”

  “If I can just show you my papers, which are all in order,” Cenzo said. It was not true, but Cenzo was willing to say anything to buy time.

  “What about her papers? Your sweetheart’s.”

  “She lost them in a raid.”

  “Can she speak?”

  “She’s French.”

  “She’s a little scrawny, but we’ll keep her and let you go. How’s that for a trade?”

  “In fact, she is a favorite of the High Command.”

  “Is that so? Of the entire High Command? Does she have a special talent?”

  Giulia had listened to the conversation but her eyes were brilliant and Cenzo wished she looked less interesting.

  “Je donne des leçons d’equitation au général Kassel,” she said.

  Personal riding lessons for the general? That gave the sergeant all sorts of reasons to hesitate.

  “Go,” he finally said, “get the devil out of here.”

  • • •

  Giulia was unprepared for Giorgio. Physically, the resemblance to Cenzo was startling, with the same broad features and dark eyes; but while Cenzo had a singularity, Giorgio had the smoothness of someone who had played many roles. He had been a navy frogman, a mountaineer, an Arctic explorer, a matinee idol, and more. He could play any number of leading men, but, maybe, with each role he lost a little bit of himself.

  “Ah, the prodigal brother,” Giorgio said. “I worried about you. Remember, I loaned you some of my best clothes.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” Cenzo said.

  “Just keep your head down. I don’t want any holes in my hats. Where have you been?”

  “He was with me,” Giulia said.

  Giorgio studied her. “This is the fair Giulia? Cenzo didn’t tell me you were so attractive. But I’m sure he’s told you nothing good about me either.”

  “Maybe we should go someplace else,” Giulia suggested to Cenzo.

  Giorgio protested, “Maria would be very unhappy with me if I chased you away.”

  Giulia turned to Cenzo. “Is this true?”

  “Yes.”

  “Maria Paz will be down in a moment,” Giorgio said. “She is tending to her husband, who is ill. You can imagine the difficulties of transferring medicine and supplies in wartime, but she is ingenious. And she is fond of Cenzo. I can’t imagine why.”

  They all turned as the gate to an elevator opened for a woman who was both mature and powerfully seductive.

  “Welcome. I am Maria Paz Rodriguez and this is the residence of the Argentine consul. Please come out to the veranda. I wish I could offer you better hospitality, but all the china and glasses are packed.”

  “I’m surprised Otto and Vera aren’t here,” Cenzo said.

  “My ever-present guests,” Maria Paz explained to Giulia.

  “More like stowaways,” Giorgio said.

  “I’m afraid that’s what we’re doing now,” Giulia said.

  “Nonsense, war makes us all equal. We’re in the process of moving,” Maria said. “Or is it ducking? Sit, please. Every day we have a different configuration of furniture and new ways to trip over it. How old are you, dear?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “My God, that makes me feel ancient.”

  “She needs a passport,” Cenzo said.

  “What’s the urgency?” Maria asked.

  “Someone is trying to kill her,” Cenzo said.

  “Who?”

  “We don’t know. Her father was involved in negotiations for surrender and his group was betrayed.”

  “By whom? Can you point him out?” Maria asked.

  “I would recognize him anywhere,” Giulia said.

  “Ah, I see the drink cart,” Giorgio said. “A martini cannot be far behind. Cenzo, I know you would like to shoot me, but first we should celebrate. Some patriots from the navy came to see me. They wanted me to take a one-man submarine and sink a British battleship.”

  “You’ve done it before,” said Cenzo.

  “But I was younger then. Do you know how many men there are on a battleship? About a thousand. They wanted to sink the ship as a final gesture. I might have done it if there were a chance of winning, but now it’s just murder. I’m sorry, I ramble on. So, to build a perfect martini: first, a martini glass of gin, then a discreet drop of vermouth and stir. Try it.”

  “No, thanks,” Cenzo said.

  “What a killjoy.”

  “The Germans are rounding up the Italian SS and shipping them to labor camps,” Cenzo said.

  “My heart bleeds for them,” Maria said.

  “And my news is that I’ve been fired,” Giorgio said.

  “You? The Lion of Tripoli?” Cenzo asked.

  Giorgio swallowed his martini and cleared his throat to make room for another. “Maybe one of the ladies would like a drink? Yes, I’m a voice from the past. They’re going to let a younger announcer try his hand. Less connected to the old regime.”

  “Who is ‘they?’” Giulia asked.

  “The propaganda office. The forces that be.”

  “Are they watching you?” Cenzo asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “They fired you and let you walk away?” Cenzo asked. “I would think you know all sorts of embarrassing secrets. The emphasis on ‘embarrassing.’”

  “I suppose someone may be following me. Let them. I’m not going to spend my days watching my back.”

  “You’re not afraid?” Cenzo asked.

  “Let’s just say I’ll be on the alert. By the way, the bar has been open a full ten minutes and we have yet to see Otto and Vera. Not a good sign.”

  “And where Vera is you will find Claretta, and where Claretta is you will find Mussolini. No one has seen Claretta for days,” said Maria. “Or Otto, for that matter.”

  “The war has yet to begin in Salò,” said Giorgio. “Once the attack begins, partisans will go door-to-door hunting for Fascists.”

  “Won’t that mean you?” Giulia had hardly spoken since she arrived at the consulate.

  “You have an out,” Cenzo said to Giorgio. “You were trying to help Colonel Steiner negotiate a surrender.”

  “That’s not good enough for partisans like Dante,” said Giorgio. “He demands a moral cleansing. What are you and Giulia going to do?”

  “The best thing for us is to leave.” Cenzo turned to Maria. “But she needs a passport. Can you make her one?”

  Maria went into the reception room and came back with a passport. “The only problem is that I’m out of the passport business. In fact, I’m out of papers of identification altogether except for this one. Someone else’s photograph is pasted in and she’s not exactly Snow White.” The picture was of a woman in her thirties who looked shrunken by grief, with gray hair and dark half-moons under her eyes.

  “Can you do it?” Giulia asked.

  “Can I turn a woman into a girl? It’s easier to turn a fiddle into a priceless violin than to take the years off a woman’s face. We’ll see if I can perform a miracle.”

  30

  Maria Paz sat in the basement of the consulate and rubbed the edge of the ID with sandpaper. Blew the dust off. Soaked the pages with watered-down coffee. Dried them with a hair dryer and used the picture’s abuse to welcome old creases and create new ones.

  Giulia sat on a stool next to Maria and followed her work. From time to time the girl glanced up at violins in different stages of creation; some instruments gleamed like honey, others looked naked without varnish or headless without scrolls.

  “We’ll lighten the face, darken the hair,” Maria said, “and look for similar characteristics such as a beauty mark, passionate lips, an intellectual forehead. They swallow it every time. Since we don’t want to leave
paint on the surface of the print, we’re using a pencil instead.” She studied the photo from every angle as if it were a work by Leonardo. “Petty officials always sign with a flourish. It’s their way of exercising power.” She dipped her pen into a bottle of Pelikan ink. “How old are you again?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “And how long were you with Cenzo on his boat?”

  “Three weeks.”

  “And . . .”

  “What?”

  “Nothing happened? A man and a woman are alone on a small boat for three weeks and you tell me that nothing happened?”

  “None of your business.”

  “Well, if I were alone with a man for three weeks on a small boat, he would know it. I’m sorry. I didn’t lose my virginity, I sold it to the highest bidder. And by then I was already an accomplished forger.”

  “I don’t think I’ll need either skill.”

  “You never know. More importantly, I learned how to make men think they were taking advantage of me. You’re not selling a painting or a violin, you’re selling a story. ‘Keep your head and you won’t lose it’ was my first lover’s advice. He was French. Unfortunately, he lost his head to the guillotine.”

  “What about you and Giorgio?” Giulia asked.

  “There’s no denying that we’ve slept together, but we’re grown-ups. It doesn’t mean anything to him or me.”

  “It doesn’t? What about Gina? Wasn’t he in love with her?”

  “Poor man. He had never fallen in love before, and I think for the first time in his life, he suffered.”

  • • •

  While the two women worked downstairs in Maria’s studio, Cenzo and Giorgio shared the consulate reception room like two snakes in a basket.

  “You’re having a grand time, aren’t you?” Giorgio said. “Do you think you’re going to be happy going back to Pellestrina now that you’ve seen the big wide world?”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll enjoy watching you go under, then I can happily go back to fishing in Pellestrina. Out of curiosity, how did you lose your position of honor? If ever I saw someone who would eat worms for the sake of advancement, it would be you.”

  “You know, there were times when I actually missed having you around. Then I thought: No, I’d just as soon push you under a train.” Giorgio tapped out cigarettes, one for Cenzo and one for himself.

  Cenzo thought Giorgio was more worried than he let on. He had the expression of a man used to being in control but, without his position at the radio, how could he claim to be the “Voice of a New Italy”?

  Maria Paz and Giulia brought wine and glasses up the stairs and Maria showed the ID to Cenzo. “Crude, but it will do. We have to let it dry anyway. The last touch will be the ‘Aryan stripe,’” a red diagonal stripe on the photo page.

  “You don’t seriously think anyone is going to exercise the racial laws at this point,” Giorgio said.

  “Only a thousand SS at checkpoints,” Cenzo said.

  “And then what?”

  “Then I will finally get back to the Lido and empty my nets. There must be a million fish in them by now.”

  “That’s all you can think of?” Giorgio asked. “Catching fish?”

  Cenzo hadn’t meant it seriously, but now, having uttered the words, he understood how they could be misinterpreted.

  “What will you do?” Maria asked Giulia.

  “Yes, what will I do?” Giulia asked Cenzo.

  He hesitated, because with Giulia every step could be a slip.

  “I don’t see you cleaning fish for the rest of your life,” Giorgio said.

  “It’s not entirely up to me,” she said.

  Yet it sounded wrong, Cenzo thought, as if he were dismissing her, and she looked away. “I mean, she knows what she wants.”

  “Do I?” Giulia asked.

  But she would be an outsider in Pellestrina, Cenzo thought. It was selfish of him to complicate her life. She could be a teacher or a tourist guide or just plain rich. He could only be a fisherman and the most he could hope for was to deliver her safely to Venice.

  “She can make up her own mind. Giorgio is right,” Cenzo said. “I think small. He thinks of the big picture whether he is with Mussolini or against.”

  “Should I take that as a compliment?” Giorgio asked.

  “Not really. You know, I wondered whether you might denounce Il Duce on the radio. It would have been a brilliant stroke. Now that your radio career is kaput, you’ll have to find something else to deliver. Maybe an American chocolate bar? Something.”

  To change the subject, Maria said, “I thought Otto might have joined Mussolini’s convoy. The only thing I can’t figure out is why. I’ve never known Otto to play with dice that weren’t loaded in his favor. For that matter, why is Mussolini driving aimlessly around the lakes?”

  “There’s nothing aimless about it,” Giorgio said. “He’s visiting banks and picking up gold bullion as he goes. And who is better positioned to help with the swift deposit of gold into Swiss Banks than Otto Klein?”

  “How can he do that?” Giulia asked.

  “Who can stop him?” Cenzo said. “He’s still Mussolini.”

  Conversation stopped at the sound of the earth being concussed.

  “Good Lord, what was that?” Maria asked.

  They ran outside to see black smoke climb the horizon to the north.

  “The Garda Tunnel,” Giorgio said. “The Allies are bombing it.”

  “No,” Cenzo said. “There aren’t any planes. The Germans must be setting off explosives to stop the Americans from coming through.”

  • • •

  What were high explosives but innocent gasses moving fast enough to tear apart metal and flesh? Some soldiers sat by the road with blood caked around their noses and ears. Others wandered, stupefied by the sound of an explosion that continued to reverberate in their heads. There weren’t as many flames as Cenzo expected; the force of the explosion had snuffed out most blazes. But a multitude of small fires hopped like living creatures from place to place, and as ambulances arrived, medics had to maneuver around twisted, unidentifiable pieces of artillery. The robot tank lay wrapped in its own loose treads.

  Colonel Steiner was black as a coal miner but he stood at the mouth of the tunnel and directed a circus of litters and trucks, shouting over the sound of heavy machinery. His face and hands were charred from dragging bodies from the fire and his eyebrows were singed. Cenzo thought that when the colonel got to the hospital, they would have to peel off his clothes.

  “What happened?” Cenzo asked.

  Steiner said he didn’t know. “I think a rocket launcher went off on its own. We still have more unexploded ammunition in the tunnel and at least one man alive.”

  Cenzo heard a muffled cry that seemed to come from the center of the earth. “Can you get him out?”

  “The poor boy is trapped,” Steiner said.

  “That’s going to drive the other men crazy,” Giorgio said.

  A soldier’s nightmare was to die after hours of agony. Morphine, mother, and God were invoked, in that order.

  “Have you tried to get to him?” Cenzo asked.

  “Impossible. It’s too unstable,” Steiner said.

  “Do you have morphine?” Cenzo asked.

  Giulia read Cenzo’s mind. “Don’t do it,” she said.

  “I handled mines in Ethiopia. I’m used to this.” Cenzo picked up a flashlight and a syrette of morphine from a medic, then tied a kerchief around his mouth and nose.

  “You’re not serious,” Giorgio said.

  “No,” Cenzo said.

  “You’re not impressing anyone,” Giorgio said.

  “It’s no worse than a dragon’s asshole,” Cenzo said to keep his spirits up and entered the cave. All hope abandon, ye who enter here. Cenzo had n
ever appreciated Dante’s Inferno so much.

  As Cenzo entered, he saw no color, just the gray beam of his flashlight being sucked into a twisted maw.

  “Can you hear me?” he shouted.

  Cenzo knew land mines from his time in Africa. One type was as circular and heavy as a kitchen pot. A Bouncing Betty could bounce waist-high before exploding. The orange and green flags he had seen before had been blown away. He remembered that, as a general pattern, mines were planted every ten feet for tanks and every four feet for personnel. Theoretically, once a man knew the pattern, he could survive. Cenzo shuffled forward, the better to nudge land mines aside rather than step on them.

  He crouched under the smoke and at points crawled rather than crouched. The explosives he used to know had been set to detonate in a sequence; this one had been detonated like a single lightning bolt.

  “Hello?” Cenzo called, but sound was absorbed and there was no response apart from a cry farther on. The trick was not to get trapped by will-o’-the-wisps that danced among the cartridges; he had to beat out flames that started to crawl up his pant leg.

  “Can you hear me?” Cenzo called again. He squeezed between the tank and a tunnel wall, both hot from the blast.

  The cries stopped directly in front of him and the flashlight found the bright eyes of a man on the point of death. Cenzo felt the tunnel shift around him. The soldier was a boy and he pointed to his belt. Gott mit Uns was engraved on his buckle. God Is with Us.

  Cenzo crawled closer and released the buckle. The soldier’s relief seemed exquisite, then his intestines poured out, his head lolled to the side, and he was dead.

  “Jesus,” Cenzo said. He couldn’t imagine what kind of God would mete out such agony.

  “I’ve seen worse,” a voice said from behind.

  Cenzo twisted around.

  “Giorgio?”

  All Cenzo could see of his brother was his head. In the close beams of the flashlights, it was like sharing hell with the devil.

  Blood was everywhere. Religious medals hung around the necks of dead Polish workers, Iron Crosses on German sappers.

  Cenzo sneezed and the tank suddenly began to move. It had a comic aspect, like a funny man’s double take, but the top tread caught his pants and dragged him slowly but single-mindedly forward. A Panzer tank weighed about forty tons. It was not an equal match, but Giorgio tried to jam pieces of metal he found into the track without losing a finger.