Alibi: A Novel (13 page)

She stopped and turned to face me. “I don’t know why you’re doing this. Trying to ruin everything.”

“I’m not trying to ruin anything. I’m trying to help you. You almost married this man.”

She looked at me. “I am marrying this man.”

“You can’t. You can’t marry someone like this. Are you that far gone?”

She tried to smile, her eyes moist. “Yes, I’m that far gone.”

“Have you been listening at all? A man like this—”

“A man like what? Don’t you think I know what kind of man he is?”

“No. I don’t think you know him at all. You’ve just rushed into this like you rush into everything else. Except this time it might be harder to get out. Not to mention more expensive.”

“Oh,” she said with a small gasp, deflated. “What a hateful thing to say.”

“I’m sorry,” I said quickly, seeing her eyes fill, but she waved me away.

“No one can hurt like a child.” She brushed her hair back, rallying. “Is that what you think? Well, darling, I’m sorry to disappoint you. Or him, for that matter. But really, I’m not Doris Duke. Isn’t it too bad? Of course I’ve told him that. But if you like, I’ll tell him again. So he can be absolutely sure what he’s getting. All right?”

“I didn’t mean—”

“Yes, you did. You’re full of meanness today, I’m not sure why. Maybe you don’t want me to marry anyone.”

“I just don’t want you to marry him. Neither would you, if you’d stop and listen for two minutes.”

“Oh, just him. But the thing is, darling, no one else has asked me.”

“Mother—”

“So we’ll do this. I’ll tell him again I’m not rich.”

“It’s not about the—”

“And if he still wants to go ahead—just on the off chance that he’d like me for myself—will that make you feel better?” She stared at me for a second, then turned to the door. “Good. Now can I have my bath?”

After she left, I just stood there, not knowing what to do. Follow her and keep arguing? For what? More tears and stubborn indifference, past listening. What Claudia had predicted; the last thing I’d expected.

I picked up the coffee, tepid now and slightly bitter, and finished it, then stood looking at the wall, the light from the water outside moving on it in irregular flashes, out of rhythm, jumpy.

He’d tell her some story. A hysterical response to a hospital death. Who would say otherwise? Were there hospital records? Another name, she’d said. Not even a paper trail. I walked over to the window. On the side table there was a new picture—not the jaunty Zattere one on the dressing table but Gianni in a more formal pose, seated at a desk, with papers in front of him for signing. I picked up the photograph and looked at his eyes, half expecting to find some peering intensity, visible evil. But of course it was only Gianni. How easy had it been for him to point Signor Grassini out? A struggle? Routine? Something he’d done before, in the habit of informing? There wouldn’t have been only one.

I looked again at Gianni at his desk. Papers to sign. There was always paper somewhere. Almost without thinking, I slid the picture out of its frame and put it in my pocket. More reliable than memory, sometimes, the paper of a crime.

I
caught the traghetto that crossed the Grand Canal to the Gritti and then headed toward San Moise. A few days, Joe had said—maybe he had already gone. But the Bauer still had a Sullivan registered, and while I was using the house phone to call him, I spotted him at breakfast in the dining room facing the rio.

“Late start?” I said, going up to the table.

“Late night. You just caught me. Sit, but don’t expect too much.” He rubbed his temples, wishing away the hangover.

“Thanks.” I took a cornetti from the bread basket in front of him. “Eat something. It helps.”

“Did I call you or did you call me?”

“I called you. I need a favor.”

“Too late. I go back to Verona at fourteen hundred.”

“That’s where I need the favor.”

He raised his eyebrows over the coffee cup.

“Could you run a check on somebody? See what you’ve got hiding in the files?”

“Italian?”

I took out the photograph.

“Isn’t this the guy from the other day? You always run a check on your friends?”

“He’s not a friend.”

“Bad boy?”

“I think so.”

“What’d he do?”

“Cooperated with the SS rounding up Jews.”

“He wouldn’t be the first. They insisted, you know.”

“I don’t think it was like that. I think he helped.”

“Adam, for chrissake, if I had a nickel for everybody who—”

“I know. Frau Schmidt telling on the neighbors. This is something else. He’s a doctor. Old family. He had a choice.”

“Army?”

“No. Probably too old. Maybe too smart.”

“So?”

“So, what else? This stuff—it usually doesn’t happen just once. You know. It’s part of who you are.”

“Fascist?”

“Maybe, but not only that. I mean, what the hell, the mailman probably had a party card. Did he work with the Germans? What did he do? Sort of thing you might turn up in your files.”

“Might.” He looked again at the picture. “You have a name?”

I took out a pen and started writing. “He may have used another. That’s why the picture—in case somebody might spot him.”

“Somebody like who?”

“Come on, Joe, we worked the same street. You must have somebody just looking at pictures to see what he can see. An old partisan, maybe. Somebody looking to get even.”

Joe took a sip of coffee. “Is that what you’re looking to do?”

I met his gaze over the cup. “He wants to marry my mother.”

“Jesus, Adam, we’re not a fucking reference bureau. If you don’t like him—”

“He’s a bad guy. I just want to know how bad.”

“Look, let me explain something to you. This isn’t Frankfurt. The setup’s different here. We’re not trying to punish anybody. The Italians are supposed to be the victims, the good guys. We don’t keep those kinds of files on them. And the Italians, they don’t want to know. They settle things privately. It’s what they’re good at. Since
fucking Rome. Some Fascist prick set up a partisan ambush? They don’t bother with a trial. They just stick him with a shiv some night and go about their business. You see Mussolini in the dock? Just strung him up at a gas station. They don’t want us running trials here. They take care of their own.”

“So what are you doing here then?”

“German trials. The Germans want trials. Or maybe we want them to have them. Anyway, they do. And when the evidence is here, we have to come get it. Kesselring did a lot here before they transferred him back. Just wiped people out. So things get lost in Germany, we find something else here. It doesn’t matter where he did it as long as he did it. It’s the Germans we’re after, not your mother’s boyfriend.” He put the picture back on the table.

“So let’s see, that means you’ve got the German army files—what they didn’t take. They take much?”

“Some.”

“And you’ve probably got that cross-referenced with the Salò government files—liaison reports anyway. SS? Nobody kept files like they did, we know that. So what do we have? The army worked with Italians, so there’d be sheets on them there. Secret police reports, for sure. SS would have their own little black book of informers. Somebody like Gianni, they’d probably give him a file all his own, wouldn’t they?”

Joe raised his eyes again. “Yes.”

“In other words, the German files have got practically everything we want to know about the Italians, wouldn’t you say? Except what they said to each other. And all I want to know is what he said to the Germans. What they had to say about him.”

“An Italian civilian? We’re not here for that. They’re our friends.”

“Yeah, well, so are the Germans now.”

“We’re not supposed to use the files this way.”

“What are you talking about? That’s
all
we did.”

“You’re not in the army anymore. And he’s Italian. We’re not supposed to—”

“Jesus Christ, Joe, the old man is lying there in a hospital bed and this guy fingers him. In a hospital bed. How much protection is he supposed to have?”

Joe said nothing for a minute, then pocketed the paper and photograph.

“All right. All I’m saying is, this isn’t Frankfurt. We may not
have
anything.”

“If you don’t, you don’t. I’ll bet you’ve got a Herr Kroger.” Our assistant, for whom the files were a series of live wires running from connection to connection, the whole a wonderful bright web in his brain.

“Soriano,” Joe said, nodding. “Signora. Pretty good, too.”

“Put her on it. She’ll know right away if it’s worth a little sniffing. I don’t want to tie you up with this.”

Joe grinned. “No, just use my best snoop. You don’t change.” He patted the pocket with the photograph. “You really love this guy, huh? What if I come up dry?”

“There has to be something. A man who’d do that—it’s never just once.”

“And you’re sure he did?”

“There was an eyewitness.”

“And you’re sure—”

“She was the old man’s daughter.”

“Oh, she was,” Joe said, looking at me. “Then she’d know.”

“Yes, she would,” I said, staring back.

Joe sighed and put his napkin on the table. “Well, this was fun. Just like old times. You have a phone here?”

“On the paper. I’ll come to Verona if—”

“No, you don’t want to come anywhere near me. It’s not Frankfurt, remember? Anyway, I’m not as much fun as I used to be. Can I ask you something? This guy, does he know that you know?”

I looked at him, surprised that this hadn’t occurred to me, then nodded. Of course he knew. Claudia would have told me.

“Some fucking wedding,” Joe said.

I walked back, taking the wide swing over the Accademia bridge, then sat for a while in the Campo San Ivo. There was a shaft of sun in the square, and some bundled-up old people sat on benches with their faces turned to it. At the end of the campo boats swept by on the Grand Canal. Where my mother had come to be happy. So special it seemed not just outside the war but outside time. But that had been another trick of the light, like the hypnotic movement of the water. Nowhere was outside. And now everything here would be Gianni, every detail a daily reminder. Gothic arched windows, flowerpots on terraces, the view from the Monaco lounge. She’d be miserable and, stubbornly, she’d refuse to go. The leaving itself could be easy. My mother had always lived a gypsy life of suitcases and short-term leases. A few days would do it. Bertie could deal with the house. Mimi could make the public excuses. And she’d be out of it. If she’d go.

I saw her face for a second as she’d turned from the door this morning, wounded. By me, every word a kind of betrayal. What would it look like now, knowing I’d asked for his file? But what was the alternative? If he’d lie about the hospital, what else would he lie about? What was the point of finding out later, when she was already trapped, crushed by the disappointment of it? The sooner, the better. She might listen to Bertie. A calm meeting, moving her gently from point to point until she saw. It was just a question of making her see.

I got up and started back to the house. We’d both apologize. We’d tiptoe around it. She’d ask what Claudia had actually said, what she’d seen. We’d talk.

But when I got to the house, she’d already gone out. “A fitting, for the dress,” Angelina said. “She left a message.”

I went over to the table and took the paper out of the silver dish. “Don’t forget to call Gianni,” it read, as if nothing had been said at all.

Claudia wasn’t at the Accademia, so I walked toward the Rialto and then, on a whim, went to the library and spent a few hours leafing
through a bound volume of
Il Gazzettino
. The first roundup had been in December ’43, but Claudia hadn’t been taken until later—fall, after a few months hiding on the Lido. I started with July, piecing together bits of Italian until word blocks began to fall into place, the way menus become familiar. Gianni’s name never came up. But why would it? Claudia wasn’t there either, or Abramo Grassini. Not even the word Ebreo. No one had combed through the hospital, looking for victims. No one had been transported. August. Nothing had happened. La Serenissima had survived the occupation doing what it always had—entertaining visitors. The violinists in San Marco would have played waltzes. Not many photographs, only the occasional officer in gray in the background, taking coffee. September. The war was happening somewhere else, troops fighting in the south, only partisan bands in the Veneto. A train derailed near Verona, a munitions depot blown up—cowardly acts designed to thwart the Italian war effort (had the typographer set this with a straight face?), Communist-inspired, probably Milanese. The Communists, in fact, were behind everything, the real threat, more insidious than the advancing Allies or the protective Germans. The monsignor called for peace, an end to criminal acts. But even the partisans were somewhere else, at the other end of the bridge across the lagoon. In Venice, nothing happened.

I started to close the book, letting the pages fall on one another, backward through the summer, and suddenly there he was, same face, receding hair. I stopped and flipped until I came back to the photograph. Not Gianni, the older brother. Gustavo Paolo Lorenzo, known as Paolo. Dead in the war, Gianni had said, but not exactly in the front lines, according to
Il Gazzettino
. A car accident near Asolo, where he was staying or living—my Italian wasn’t nuanced enough to tell. Odd to think of any Venetian in a car, much less dying in one. Is that why Gianni had given him a better end? I looked at the photograph again—Gianni’s eyes, spaced wide over the same high nose, a subtly different mouth, the whole look older, not quite as personable. Had they been close? I read through the obituary, looking for some sense of their lives together, but the article was respectful and dull. A long genealogy, a list of charitable associations, but evidently no
profession. Only second sons had to think of it. The lucky older brother, who’d lived on what was left. An ordinary, conventional life. The only hint of flair had been a youthful enthusiasm for auto racing—and, the piece did not say but implied, look where that had led. No other passengers in the wreck. Mourned by his many friends and colleagues.