The Girl From Venice Read online

  He came out of his reverie when something rocked the boat from the other side. He had been so pleased with himself for escaping the gunboat that he never considered the possibility that one of the Germans might have followed him.

  He hauled himself onto the boat by his elbows, ready to attack. Instead he was face-to-face with the dead girl. She sat up and, without a blink, went back to consuming his polenta patty.

  3

  Cenzo knew the lagoon’s hidden currents and channels, the deep sluices and semi-islands that appeared and disappeared with the tide, and he had hoped the girl was only a vision; yet here she was, licking her fingers and staring at him by the dim light of his lamp while she consumed the last of his polenta.

  “Taste good?” Cenzo asked. “You’re eating my supper too. Do you like it?”

  The girl said nothing.

  “What are you doing out here?” he asked.

  Silence.

  “What’s your name?”

  Not a word. That was all right. The less he knew about her, the better. She was like a fish that had flopped into his boat. What he had to do now was throw her back out. Maybe she would just vanish. It was unnatural the way she appeared and disappeared. He couldn’t tell how old she was, anything from fifteen to twenty.

  “I thought you were dead. Were you dead? Did you come back to life? You don’t want to say? Have it your way. What I’m going to do is take you to the police. If you don’t like that, you can always go back in the water.”

  He stood and pushed off with an oar to nudge the Fatima through the reeds. It was a beautiful night, stars pouring down. The way sound carried over water, it was just as well she didn’t want to talk. What he did not understand was how the girl had gotten so far from the mainland. The lagoon was shallow enough that a person could wade across much of it, but only by fighting currents going this way and that. The grasses, too, were a maze of channels that were waist-high one minute and underwater the next.

  When he found a wind he raised the sail. The Fatima was about as fancy as a wooden clog, but its simplicity was its strength. It was designed with a high bow for bad weather and, for shallow water, a flat deck, no keel at all. Cenzo stole a glance and the girl combed out her hair with her fingers like a lady. He felt her twist around to get a sense of where she was. She wasn’t afraid, he had to give her credit for that. But she still didn’t give him an answer.

  Sardines leapt into the boat and flopped around the deck. Volunteers, probably escaping a pike, Cenzo thought. Rather than slip on them, he tossed them back into the water. The girl stayed on her seat, an unwelcome but determined stowaway, her eyes steadily trained on him.

  Cenzo didn’t necessarily have a heart of stone. He took care of two families; people depended on him. He couldn’t take chances. A month before, the body of a German soldier had washed up in the lagoon. The Germans simply lined up seven Italians and shot them dead.

  Ahead was an ancient lazzaretto, an island where victims of the plague had been isolated, dumped, and burned. Not a pretty sideshow in Venice’s history, but a perfectly suitable place to leave someone to be found and rescued, Cenzo thought, until he saw the gunboat as good as waiting for them at the island’s dock.

  The gunboat looked like a giant crustacean half out of the sea. On the upper deck, Lieutenant Hoff straddled the machine gun and sang in a romantic tenor, “Wie einst, Lili Marleen.” Cenzo supposed it was no easy thing to maintain esprit de corps on the losing side of a long war, and a little carousing was to be expected. These were the troops of the walking dead. They had fought and lost at Anzio, had fought and lost at Monte Cassino, and they had seen enough fighting to know that, for them, the most likely end to this war was the grave.

  Cenzo dropped sail and steered wide of the gunboat, but sheer momentum carried the Fatima into the mouth of a canal. The girl held him with a stare that made it plain she thought he had made a bargain with the Germans and was delivering her as agreed. She gave him a look that condemned him to hell and dove into the water.

  Hoff climbed down from the gunboat, unbuttoned his trousers, and marched unsteadily into the dark to answer the call of nature. He pissed, shivered, and rose on tiptoe as he spied the girl climbing the bank. Patience was rewarded.

  She clambered up the opposite bank to the paths and benches of an unkempt garden, driving a wave of rats from under a blanket of vines. A balustrade of marble and brick ran along the canal and she thought she saw faces move along the windows of the top floor. She pantomimed a call for help but all they did was shuffle forward in a dreamlike state. She pushed open a rusted door, stepped inside, and felt the sting of broken glass, then ducked as a white butterfly, like the beam of a flashlight, chased her down a hall.

  “Mein kleines Liebchen, my sweetheart, do you know what this was?” Hoff asked. “A home for the mentally ill. But this island was also for quarantine, for carriers of the plague. They would be kept here to either get well or die. Usually die.”

  The girl crawled to a room meant for storage. What remained were headless saints, scavenged plumbing, and bats that fluttered in confusion. Meanwhile, Hoff played with his flashlight as if it were a watch on a fob. As he crossed the floor, his tone turned thoughtful, even philosophical.

  “War has become too anonymous. There will be no odes written to today’s heroes. No ‘Horst Wessel Song’ or ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade.’ Even in the camps, identity is reduced to a number tattooed on the arm. You should thank me for sparing you that indignity.”

  She crept into a courtyard gone wild with oleander and the flashlight’s beam played hide-and-seek until she took cover behind a marble wellhead that was as tall as her chest and sculpted with the Winged Lion, the symbol of Venice. The beam bounced around courtyard tiles ever closer to the wellhead until the light shined directly in her eyes.

  “Giulia,” Lieutenant Hoff said. “We almost missed you. In fact, we had crossed you off the list, which would have been a great disappointment.” He grabbed her by the hair, and when she kicked he held her at arm’s length as if she were a trophy fish. “You will meet your father soon. Time is running out.” The lieutenant found inspiration in the open mouth of the well. “Quarantine, naturally. That’s the prescribed remedy for vermin.”

  But as he lifted her, his head whipped sideways. He staggered and turned to face Cenzo, who held a bloody iron pipe. The lieutenant had to laugh that anyone so inconsequential—an Italian, a barefoot fisherman at that—would assault an SS officer. He dodged Cenzo’s second swing and pulled the pipe from his hands. As Hoff unfastened the holster flap of a pistol, the girl bit his hand and the gun fell. He swiped her aside and stood wrestling with Cenzo as intimately as if in a dance, each choking the other while they kicked the gun and flashlight back and forth. Hoff won the gun but Cenzo picked up the iron pipe and hit the lieutenant flush across the forehead. The girl found the flashlight and aimed its beam into Hoff’s eyes as they went opaque. An expression of disbelief, a general unraveling, passed over his face. Cenzo pushed the lieutenant and guided him over the lip of the wellhead to a momentary levitation, then to a plunge down the shaft and the sound of a muffled thud, followed by silence.

  Cenzo gathered the gun, pipe, and flashlight and dropped them down the well after Lieutenant Hoff.

  Shouting the lieutenant’s name, Germans poked the dark with their flashlights as Cenzo and the girl moved from the courtyard to a garden. He carried her, because the soles of her feet were tender and his were tough. Besides, he had explored the island since he was a boy. He knew which paths were a maze and where artichoke plants grew to the size of men in armor and where wild goats shuffled in and out of olive trees. He took her on a switchback path that clung to the shadows until they reached the water. He put her down and they waded to the stern of the Fatima.

  Cenzo assumed that some Germans were still aboard the gunboat. He had her hold on to the bowline while he slid the Fatim
a off the grass and pushed it toward open water. He stood and rowed two-handed, thrusting his whole body into each stroke, leaving wakes that were little more than swirls in the water. On the island, shouts faded, but Cenzo did not raise his sail until he and the girl were out of earshot and beyond the range of the gunboat’s spotlight.

  “The Germans won’t find their friend in the dark right away, but they’re very thorough. They’ll find him. Then they’ll come looking for you and me. So if you have someplace to go, now is the time to say so.”

  She was silent.

  He said, “The German called you Giulia. Is that your name?” It was like trying to open a clam with bare fingers. “Giulia, why did the SS officer mention a list? What kind of list? A list of names? Jewish names?” She said nothing. “Perhaps you don’t understand: compared to a gunboat, the Fatima is, well, not much faster than a cork. I find it hard to believe that your plan was simply to jump into the water.”

  She flinched when he moved toward her and draped his jacket over her shoulders. As long as she remained silent, she was a mystery. Cenzo couldn’t claim to know anything about her, but he did know a little about the German SS. They only pursued two groups with the ferocity they showed against the girl Giulia: partisans and Jews. And people who helped them.

  “Giulia?” he asked, but exhaustion had taken its toll, and she was fast asleep. He looked up at the coverlet of stars, the constellations that had comforted him when he was a boy.

  • • •

  When the girl awoke, the sky was bright and blue and the Fatima was approaching a scattering of weathered shacks that stood on stilts above the water. Cenzo’s was the farthest from shore. He furled his sail, tied up to a pier, and urged her up a ladder.

  The shack was built with enough oakum to caulk a boat, with makeshift portholes instead of windows and gaps in the floor that offered glimpses of water below. Rubber boots stood with a footlocker and laundry bag. Hardtack and cheese were suspended in a mesh bag out of the reach of rats. Nets were rolled in a corner. Orange crates had been turned into a desk with drawers for eating utensils, paper, string, and net needles. On one wall were hooks for clothing and on another was a painting of a fishing boat foundering in heavy seas. Lined up along the floor were jars of artist’s brushes, a cigar box of paint tubes, turpentine, and a pallet smeared with color.

  “You want to get out of those wet clothes.” Cenzo threw her a dry salt-stiffened shirt and trousers and cut off a length of rope for her to use as a belt. He turned his back while she changed. He imagined what he looked like to her: some sort of wild man, half-dressed, hair in all directions, dark as an Indian.

  “Now sit down.” She reluctantly did as she was told and he examined the soles of her feet. They were more scratched than cut, light dues after a dash across broken glass. He hadn’t studied her in the light before. She was imperious, with straight hair and a sharp chin. Cenzo conceded that the world she saw was a place where her name was on a list. The girl came with ghosts.

  “Giulia, my name is Cenzo. My boat is the Fatima and this is my . . . palace, so to speak. The point is you’ll be safe here if you stay out of sight. You understand the Fatima is damaged, so I need supplies and repairs. But collaborators and Fascists will be watching. I have to act normal and do whatever I usually do. I’ll go to my mother’s house, take a bath, go to the bar, play some cards. I’m sorry, but all that will take hours. Don’t try anything silly like trying to swim across the lagoon. It can’t be done. Most of all, don’t touch the paints. So far I haven’t seen the gunboat or any SS. But who knows? Maybe they haven’t found the officer, and if they did find him, maybe they thought he was drunk enough to fall in the well. Maybe their boat ran out of fuel. Anything is possible. Hungry?”

  He took down the cheese and carved her a slice. She maintained a suspicious eye on him as he located a bottle of grappa; it was homemade grappa and even the fumes took the breath away.

  “Look, I don’t know anything about this sort of business. I will try to help, but you have to be very careful. You hear about American pilots being rescued by partisans and led to safety? I’ve never met one of these heroes.”

  “Byron,” she said.

  He was taken by surprise. “Who?”

  “Byron, the famous poet. He swam across the lagoon.” Her voice was cracked from swallowing salty water.

  “He did?”

  “I want to go with you,” she said.

  “You can’t and I won’t be able to find any heroes for you if I stay here.”

  “Because you’re not one?”

  “Now you’re getting the idea.”

  4

  The fishing village of Pellestrina was squeezed between the lagoon on one side and the sea on the other. In between were simple two-story houses that leaned together almost close enough to touch. How could you expect otherwise from a community regularly engulfed by acqua alta in a grim battle against the sea. The rest of the village included a breakwater built by the Romans and a bunker built by the Wehrmacht. Saints precariously balanced on the cathedral roof were weary from watching the sea. At the southern end of the village was a bar and a shrine to Our Lady of Fatima, but the village was most animated by the fishing boats that shifted and creaked along its dock. Oriental eyes were painted on each bow and on the sails was each owner’s fanciful emblem: a barking dog, a unicorn, a martyr set ablaze.

  Two old fishermen sucked on their pipes and watched Cenzo spread his net across the pavers of the dock. Enrico and Salvatore Albano were so creased and browned by the sun that they could have been tree stumps.

  “Your net is all torn. You got into a fight with a swordfish?” Enrico asked.

  “You need a sword to fight a swordfish,” Salvatore said. “You want to borrow my sword? It’s rusty but it’s ready for action.”

  “That sounds frightening. You might scare the swordfish to death,” Cenzo said.

  “Touché!” They could chew on that joke for an hour.

  He left his sail for them to sew. The work afforded them loose change and something to talk about; they gossiped as much as old women and he knew what they said about him. He was Innocenzo Vianello, the man who wouldn’t sleep with the most beautiful woman in Pellestrina.

  He stopped at the marine shop to replace the broken oar, spear, buckets, and wooden boxes that Hoff had smashed. The next stop, more important, was Nido’s bar.

  The bar had no name except “Nido’s.” It had a long counter of mahogany, an espresso machine as big as a steam engine, and lukewarm bottles of wine, grappa, and liquors. A mural composed of seashells showed a map of Venice and the lagoon.

  Nido’s head was as smooth as a newel post. He had been a boxer and seen the world. On the wall hung photographs of him posing, fists up, with Georges Carpentier, Max Schmeling, and Primo Carnera.

  “Poor Primo,” Nido said. “I’m afraid he thought I had the evil eye.”

  “Why?” Cenzo loved Nido’s boxing stories.

  “I never told you this Primo story before. When America got into the war, Mussolini ordered up a newsreel that would show an Italian hero fighting an American Negro. They signed Primo as the Italian but they couldn’t find a Negro boxer anywhere in Italy, so they settled for a North African. A musician, no less. They hired a couple of us to teach him how to throw a punch. At the bell, the musician ran out of his corner, threw one punch, and knocked Primo out. That’s got to be the evil eye.”

  Salvatore and Enrico entered the bar and proceeded to the back, where there was a trellis of grapevines and outdoor tables. They joined a card game in progress with cards in hands oversized from fishing. Every once in a while someone announced “Sette!” for a winning score and “Merda!” for losing.

  “It’s not as if they spend money,” Nido told Cenzo. “I’d kick them out, but they’re the most reliable business I have. Besides, where would they go?”

  “You
have a soft heart,” Cenzo said.

  The Albano brothers smirked and cackled to each other. They had played cards all their lives. It was, Cenzo thought, a race between seniority and senility.

  “How about a grappa?” Salvatore asked.

  Enrico’s eyes became rheumy at the thought. “Very kind.”

  Salvatore shuffled back from the bar and smiled. A gap in his front teeth whistled where a gold tooth had been donated in the war drive.

  “Swords are trump,” Enrico said, and wagged his head back and forth.

  “What are you thinking?” Nido asked Cenzo.

  “I’m thinking that’s me in thirty years.”

  “Ha!” Enrico said. “He’s not so innocent, let me tell you that. He’s got women coming and going.”

  “He has to dodge them like a bullfighter,” Salvatore said.

  “That Celestina has an ass like a Maserati,” Enrico said.

  “I forget, what is trump?” Salvatore asked.

  “That Celestina,” Enrico said with a beatific smile. “She’s a regular nonpareil.”

  “How’s the fishing?” Nido asked Cenzo.

  “The Nazis were out early.”

  “On the lagoon? What were they after?”

  “The devil knows. They trashed some gear and generally made a mess of the boat.”

  “And your catch?”

  “Trashed that too.”

  “You’ve come to the right place. Not even the devil comes here.” Nido poured a glass of wine for Cenzo and one for himself. “That’s all?”

  “I believe so.”

  Nido hunched over the counter. “I’ll tell you what I heard. Last night the Germans raided the psychiatric hospital in San Clemente. Jews were hiding there and some of them tried to escape into the lagoon.”

  “They must have been pretty desperate.”